Cancer
by Kat-Knife
Summary: I always imagine my cancer to be a living breathing thing. A monster with yellowed, crooked teeth, beady red eyes and claws that end in uneven talons. I dream about it at night sometimes. Cancer slinks into my hospital room when I'm sleeping, pausing to look at my emaciated form with gleeful, greedy eyes before it slips into my skin once again. The thoughts of a broken woman...


With a fierce scream I hurl the ugly glass vase that sits on my bedside table at the wall. The glass breaks apart at my assault and glass shards fly into the air in perfect arcs. I really shouldn't take out my anger on that abomination that is the only decoration in my stark, empty room, but I can't help it. The anger is building up in me and I need to release it the only way I know how. I unsteadily drop to the floor from my bed, hissing in pain as sharp chunks of glass dig into my heels. I ignore the pain and scour the floor with frenzied eyes, searching for the perfect piece. I spot it lying a foot away from where I'm crouched beside the bed, a fragment of glass as long as my hand that tapers into a wicked sharp point. I smile a maniac smile as I clench my fist around the jagged piece of glass, relishing in the sharp pain that pierces through my hand, drawing crimson blood that slowly drips to the floor in a steady stream. The pain is good, it means that I'm still alive. Nowadays, it is the only thing that I'm able to feel besides the anger.

As I sit on the floor amid the shattered pieces of my life, I gaze blankly at the muted colours that surround me, all shades of bland white. It makes me think that all the colour in the world has bleed out and there's nothing left but this dull whiteness. It's supposed to be soothing, but to me it signifies the colour of my own personal hell.

I grip the glass dagger tighter as memories jump at me from the confines of the room. The yelling, that's what I heard first, the sound of my parents screaming at each other as I watched with slitted eyes from my bed, the wires that I was connected to slowly pumping sleeping draught into my broken body. That was the third time I had relapsed. The third time the cancer had come back in full force with a vengeance unparalleled by any Dark Lord. My parents were tired, tired of watching me getting better, my cheeks finally regaining a healthy glow, only to relapse and become a living skeleton as cancer ravaged my body with its claws. They blamed each other for the disease. My father blamed my mother for being a carrier of the disease because she was a muggleborn while my mother blamed my father for being the carrier because he was a pureblood.

I didn't blame either one of them; I just knew that I was weak, too weak to fight off the advances of cancer as my own body, my own cells rebelled against me. It felt like the ultimate betrayal and ironically laughable. Rose Weasley, the daughter of famed heroes Ron Weasley and Hermione Weasley, was dying of cancer, not because of some heroic wound that had been inflicted upon her by a rogue Pureblood that still believed in the archaic ways of long ago.

I always imagine my cancer to be a living breathing thing. A monster with yellowed, crooked teeth, beady red eyes and claws that end in uneven talons. I dream about it at night sometimes. Cancer slinks into my hospital room when I'm sleeping, pausing to look at my emaciated form with gleeful, greedy eyes, before it slips into my skin once again.

I slip my free hand up to my heart, feeling the reassuring beat._ Thud, thud, thud,_ my heart beats away, not yet touched by my enemy.

My parents are waiting to get a divorce, it's almost certain. The only reason that they haven't yet is because they don't want to hurt me. I think it's futile. I'm fully aware of the hate filled glances that they shoot at each other when they come to see me, the tone of their voice as they address each other, clipped and cold, as if they are addressing a stranger instead of their spouse. Their lives are falling apart because of me, because I'm not strong enough and I hate myself for it with every fiber of my being, but I can do nothing to put them at ease or try to put back together the life they once had.

Recently the visits to my little home on the fourth floor of St. Mungo's have become less frequent because the school year has started up and my parents and relatives have become immersed in their own lives again. I occasionally still get a visitor or two in the form of my boisterous grandmother, Molly Weasley, or my soft-spoken grandfather, Arthur Weasley, but for the most part, I've been forgotten as I waste away. It makes me angry. Angry that I'm forgotten by the people that vowed to love me forever, angry that my best friends never come around anymore, angry that the only consistent companion I have anymore is my enemy, cancer. I wish I could translate that anger to sadness, but I'm too tired to be sad anymore and I cling to the only emotion that the medications that are pumped daily into my veins allow me to exhibit, righteous anger.

I look down at my hand and see that the blood has crusted across the glass in sticky brown remnants, the halfhearted attempts of my body to heal the wounds that I've inflicted upon myself. It is pointless to keep me alive any longer. Whenever the healers come into my room every morning at precisely six o'clock sharp, I feel the words on the tip of my tongue as I watch their bleak faces examining me. I want to tell them to go ahead and slip a poison into my nightly pudding when I'm not looking or just whip out their wands and throw the killing curse at me and relieve me of my misery. I never do; I'm too much of a coward to do so and I'm stuck waiting, looking at the clock every few hours, watching it tick away, counting down the minutes until my last laboured breath leaves my body.

I unclench my fist and the bloodied piece of glass falls to the floor with a sharp clinking sound. I sink back into the hospital bed, feeling tired and sleepy, the rush from inflicting pain on my defenseless body fleeing as soon as it came. I stare at the ceiling above me, feeling drained. The only thought that briefly flits through my head before sleep swoops down to reclaim me is, _Will I wake up tomorrow?_


End file.
